Presenting with Awesomeness.

Apologies for the abrupt closing today! For those of you who didn’t make it to Presentations speeddating, here’s what I spoke about…

First, I touched on how different presentation software can affect the way you think and share your ideas in a presentation.

Powerpoint….Powerpoint is GREAT but it’s extremely linear. It’s hard to jump out to discuss the big picture, and even cyclical things can look linear in a Powerpoint. It’s also very easy to forget the major rule of presenting (which is “Big Image, Few Words”) and just throw a bunch of words up on a slide.

Prezi . Prezi is the free, web-based presentation technology that allows you to choose templates that AREN’T linear. They are circles, they are wagon wheel spokes, they are spirals…they are anything but a line. Have a talk in which showing people the forest and the trees are important? Than prezi might be for you…as long as you don’t get carsick. Word to the wise…you can sometimes spend hours picking out which template you want to use in prezi, but figuring out the right template really helps you understand what message you are trying to convey.

Haiku Deck Is my absolute new favorite. Here’s the tutorial, embedded below (provided you have flash on your device as you read this). Haiku Deck is linear like Powerpoint, but it forces you to do it right–big pictures, few words. And it saves you time because when you put the key words on each slide, it will search Flickr for Creative Commons images that match your word and then automatically puts the correct citation information along the bottom of the slide. If you want to use your own images you can…but this takes the time out of curating your own images. Haiku Deck is free, although they have some templates and images for sale for in-app purchase. I’ve done many a presentation without buying a single image though. Haiku Decks can be downloaded as either ppt. files (that’s powerpoint) or pdfs. I’ve found that now that I’ve done several Haiku Deck presentations, it’s actually trained me to “do the right thing” in other mediums, like Powerpoint and Prezi, as well. It has affected the way I do presentations.

Finally, to put it all together, I talked about SlideShark (see tutorial below). Also free for individuals, this allows you to download powerpoint presentations (or haiku deck–remember you can save those as powerpoints) and then annotate directly on the slide for your audience to see as it is projected onto the screen. Don’t want to annotate? There’s a laser pointer option built in too. Also, if you want, you can broadcast your presentation in real time on the web, so that up to thirty different computers (including one projecting onto the screen in the front of your class) can follow the presentation that you are giving from your ipad…where ever you want to stand. So you could be in the back of the classroom, annotating a slide and using a laser pointer on a slide that is projecting onto the screen in the front of the class. Brilliant.